I'm a psychiatrist and I really want you to try diagnosing Donald Trump's stability

We all know that hairdressers, bartenders and best friends are supposed to be fonts of wisdom. We wanted to put them to the test. We hired actors to play patients showing symptoms of unrevealed conditions and we invited contestants to analyze the actors. I'm a professional psychiatrist, and I was impressed at the job they did.

U.S. President Donald Trump speaks to reporters upon arrival at the White House in Washington, Friday, Jan. 26, 2018, from the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland.Manuel Balce Ceneta / AP

When it comes to U.S. President Donald Trump’s mental health, it seems everyone’s got an opinion. His presidency brings out our inner amateur shrink.

Is he crazy? Dangerous? A pathological narcissist? Are his apparent impulsivity and unique language signs of early cognitive impairment? Covfefe anyone? Or is he a stable genius, following the ancient wisdom of unpredictability laid out in Sun Tzu’s The Art of War: wily, cunningly crafty and duping everyone for strategic advantage?

I can only hope it’s the latter. But, while I find myself being asked at cocktail parties, in elevators, and in Tim Hortons line ups to offer my diagnosis of Trump’s stability, as a professional psychiatrist, I won’t. The American Psychiatric Association just this past week reminded its members of the Goldwater rule — drawn up after psychiatrists were being asked to long-distance diagnose Barry Goldwater, the last presidential candidate accused of being mentally ill — warning us shrinks that we shouldn’t be offering our professional opinions on anyone we haven’t personally met. Of course, just because the APA calls it unethical hasn’t stopped some rogue psychiatrists and psychologists over the last year from publicly declaring Trump dangerously unwell.

For some reason, it seems that people have a natural urge to want to assess other people’s mental health, even from afar. That’s why I decided that instead of fighting it, I’d go ahead and create a reality TV series called “Think You Can Shrink?” If everyone wants to be an armchair psychiatrist, I say, we should let them.

We all know that hairdressers, bartenders and best friends are supposed to be fonts of advice wisdom. So are they? We wanted to find out by putting them to the test. We hired actors to play patients showing symptoms of unrevealed conditions and we invited contestants to analyze the actors, one on one, to try and offer advice, all while being judged by a panel of medical professionals and TV personalities.

Like in our episode “Anger Management,” where the patient — an actor playing a former child celebrity whose career petered out after puberty — exhibits narcissistic anger issues. While being analyzed first by Keith, a tattooed, leather-wearing biker and then by Matt, a Zen-like hipster bartender, the conceited, foul-mouthed and short-tempered former child star “Taylor” acts self-involved and condescending as he mocks the contestants and tries his best to hurt their feelings. Does this sound like something White House personnel might find useful? Or maybe staffers on Parliament Hill?

So how did our armchair analysts do? You can watch the whole series online at ThinkYouCanShrink.com, but I admit to being surprised at how good our amateur therapists were at getting their “patients” to at least start to recognize and reflect on some pretty difficult issues. But the point of the series wasn’t just to entertain; the goal was to educate people and raise awareness about mental health, and working to reduce the stigma of mental illness.

Men, and young men in particular, despite being at a higher risk for depression and suicide, are often very reluctant to seek help for mental-health issues. In a paper on the series published last June in the Journal of Technology in Behavioral Science, colleagues and I reported that after surveying people who watched Think You Can Shrink, 86 per cent of respondents said they would feel “more comfortable in supporting a friend or family member who had the same health issue” depicted in the episode. And 75 per cent said that after watching the show they would be more likely to get help for mental health concerns if they needed it.

So while I’ll personally be refraining from assessing the stability of presidents or anyone else based on their Twitter feeds, I am still calling on every amateur shrink out there to go right ahead with your wild, off-the-cuff unprofessional diagnoses. For too long mental illness has been something we’ve been unwilling to talk about in the open, so if it takes Trump’s bizarre tweets to get the conversation happening, that works just fine for me. Now, anyone want to have a go at Kim Jong-un? Kevin O’Leary? What about Justin Trudeau? There’s a whole world of reality TV psychiatry waiting for us. Why limit it just to the nightly news?

National Post

Thomas Ungar is Psychiatrist-in-Chief at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto.